How Deep the Water Runs
by midnighrunner
Summary: They'd come together, and fallen apart, all those years ago, but he'd never truly left her.


A/n's: Because the one shot just wasn't enough.

For Twin, a thank you a day till forever and half, and Sammie-Paige224, who just wanted more Vector.

Disclaimers: All the usual apply.

And keep your AU-tinted glasses handy. (It's ORC, you should expect AU just by the nature of what it is.)

* * *

**How Deep the Water Runs**

**Chapter One**

_Wounds mend, but memories kill._

_They say they won't, but they always will._

_One more time, straight up that hill._

~.~

**Germany - Current**

"Name."

He rattled off a list – some she recognized (alias' she'd come across before), others she didn't, but she wrote them all down just the same, one after the other, her pen scratching across the yellow-pad.

"Employer."

He smiled. She waited.

"Is this really how it's gonna go?" he asked, leaning back lazily, the silver handcuff clinking. Legs stretched out before him, boots crossed at the ankles, he looked far too comfortable.

Like any average Joe on the couch, settling in for the Sunday game.

Her pen tapped gently, ink freckling onto her paper. "You were expecting what - 'please?'"

Those teeth again, white and strong, but with a laugh this time. A rough bark of a sound, like an animal caught somewhere between a sneeze and a growl.

His eyes shone with his amusement. As bright and blue and strange as she remembered.

"You haven't changed."

~.~

**Raccoon City - 1998**

_"Get up."_

_She was bleeding from a dirty gash on her forehead. One of her arms hung unnaturally, her shoulder humped in pain. Her nostrils flared, struggling to catch a full breath._

_But still she antagonized him._

_"Get up, you bastard,so I can hit you again."_

_Challenged him._

_With the ice stretched thin beneath them and the unspoken promise that it wouldn't hold them both._

_She refused to go quietly._

~.~

**Germany - Current**

She certainly _felt_twenty years old again, looking at him. Every bit the naive and green recruit that had found herself in over her head in a city gone mad.

He was the living embodiment of everything that had been, of every cold-sweat nightmare and every inescapable memory.

And he was five feet away, smiling like it was all some grand reunion. Like he wasn't a prisoner, like it wasn't the end of the line.

She willed herself to harden, to shake off the fingers of Raccoon, winding around her throat.

~.~

"Who are you working for?"

She rephrased it, asked it slower – as if his earlier lack of response was a matter of _couldn't_ rather than _wouldn't_.

It tickled him.

Just like it did to see the way she bristled, eyes flashing, and the way she hardened – like that silly nickname the papers had fawned over, thinking themselves so clever.

"Do they still call you 'Angel?'"

Those small, deceptively delicate looking, fingers holding the pen twitched, a dash jerking through her neat, even script.

"I'm sorry; were the handcuffs not a big enough clue for you? You're the one under arrest, not me. That means I ask the questions, and you give the answers."

He tipped his head. "It's a long ride back, angel girl; why should you have all the fun?"

~.~

**Raccoon City - 1998**

_Twenty-four hours before the briefing, she'd never heard of Raccoon City._

_One hour into the mission and she'd never forget it._

_Phoenix was taken first. One of the infected – she couldn't stomach the word zombie yet, it felt too silly, too made-up for what was happening – had come up from the sewer, it's broken body twisted through the grate. By the time he'd yelled, by the time they'd turned, its teeth were in him, ripping and tearing… its face washing red in the spray of blood._

_Sergeant Scream had put a bullet through its blue-black forehead._

_Then one through Phoenix's as he shuddered and writhed, his guts spilled across the pavement._

_Moe? The dogs got him. In the park, in a flash of dripping muscle,bloodied fur, and gleaming fangs. Beneath the marble Angel, the stone testament to the power of faith, he screamed and screamed as they ate him alive._

_They tried to avenge him, as they had for Phoenix, firing to the pile of wet bodies over and over… but there were too many._

_So they ran._

_The howls, human and not, chasing them into the dark._

_She told herself, tried futilely to calm herself with the belief that the worst had been done. That there could be no worse terrors for Raccoon to unleash._

_Then she met him._

_Watched him melt out of the dark nothingness of the night in a crack of blue lightning. Watched him slit Sergeant Scream's throat as she cowered beneath the hail of bullets and was helpless to do anything._

_Faceless beneath his mask, moving through the gloom like a ghost, he was Death._

_And when he turned those glowing blue eyes onto her, she knew that fate had been set._

~.~

**Germany - Current**

She pulled the cap off the end of her pen and popped it over the top. She flipped her pad closed with a flick of her wrist and set both aside.

Leaning back, arms folding over her chest, she looked him in the eye.

"Nobody's called me that since I was discharged."

He bet it stung it hear it now. Like the past reaching up to slap her in the face.

Open hand, all palm.

It was a sensation he wasn't unfamiliar with.

"BSAA hooked you up with something shiny and new, huh?" He dropped his chin, lifted an eyebrow. "Do I get to guess?"

She exhaled heavily. So very disaffected. "Does it really matter?"

~.~

**Raccoon City - 1998**

_They circled each other, slow and steady. Around them Raccoon was burning, racing to an explosive demise, but it didn't matter._

_They had survived the horrors the city had to offer._

_They'd earned the right to choose their own end._

_She passed her knife from hand to hand, alternately wiping her palms on her pants, seeking a better, surer, grip._

_He nudged a rock aside with the toe of his boot, saving himself the chance of tripping over it later._

_Somewhere a carrier cried out, it's rasping moan woeful and hungry._

_She passed into the glow of a streetlight and the tag, just there beneath the yellow-skull logo of her team, caught his eye._

_'Angel.'_

_In the heartbeat before she moved, knife swinging out, he had just enough time to appreciate the irony of it._

~.~

**Germany - Current**

He wondered what she'd say, what little tick she'd show him, if he told her the truth.

If he admitted that he already knew.

Her codename, her real name, her street address, her cellphone number. Even the name of that sorry bastard she'd been engaged to for a red hot second four years back.

They'd come together, and fallen apart, all those years ago, but he'd never truly left her.

Not really.

Not her.

He smiled.

"You tell me, angel girl; and I'll answer all your questions."


End file.
